Financial software solutions for personalization are the response to the latest wave of industry innovations. Digital banks, and fintechs are growing fast, offering something more tailored to their Small and Medium Businesses (SMB) audience than traditional financial institutions (FIs). Meanwhile, many SMBs have become more open toward fintech and FIs during COVID – and it’s no wonder. They offer more personalized service for small businesses.
The question is: How can these digital banks enhance banking for small businesses?
For starters, It’s all well and good to offer a digital platform, but often, this isn’t enough to satisfy the banking needs of small businesses. If they can’t grow their businesses as a result, it begs the question – who is this digitization for? Digital Banks are meant to be inherently customer-driven – and to achieve that, they should focus on giving SMBs more than the ability to process a business loan or payment request – businesses need insights on cash flow, the ability to sync accounting data, and accelerating business lending to name a few.
Thankfully we live in a world where SMB financial data is now regularly updated and readily available to action these requests. It’s a critical moment for digital banks who have staked their claim on offering the latest in digital banking for small businesses.
That’s where financial dashboards software comes in. With digital financial dashboards, they better serve SMBs through insights from SMB financial data. Financial dashboard software drive insights, increase accuracy, and provide digital banks with a competitive edge over legacy banks by transforming SMB data into business insights that can be used for credit analysis, fraud detection, enhanced customer service, and internal workflows.
Digital Banks exist to offer a customer-centric approach to business banking and personalization is key. According to a report released by Digitalzone, 79% of businesses who have exceeded their ROI goals shared that they have a “Documented personalization strategy”. With the development of technology, SMBs expect personalization at every touchpoint. We all know this – the critical question is how exactly do fintechs and digital banks achieve this?
Relationship managers benefit from their business customers’ growing use of cloud-based accounting and sales systems like Quickbooks- and pull the information in via a single API. With real-time access to businesses’ financial statements, sales information, and banking data, it’s now possible to offer dashboards showing business health. It’s not just about delivering a business their current ratio, debt service coverage, and how many days it takes the business to collect their outstanding receivables, it’s about demonstrating to the business that because of those ratios they should consider financing the receivables or getting an operating line of credit to support their working capital.
Financial dashboards like CFO-in-a-box give businesses the insight they need in real-time and puts the digital banks in the position of providing added value for the business. Through an automated platform, they collect real-time SMB data seamlessly. The data analytics are later calculated and analyzed by the platform to create personalized solutions. FIs gain a 360-degree view of their connected accounts’ financial health with insights and ratios, allowing relationship managers to evaluate product offerings and accurately prescribe new products.
With a better understanding of businesses’ performance and customer preferences, relationship managers can provide empathetic customer experiences, increase adoption rates and continue to divert market share from legacy banks. Now that is customer-centric!
More importantly, with real-time SMB data and automated calculations, CFO-in-a-box helps businesses self-serve which saves time and energy. Traditionally, managers have to manually pull out the financial data and calculate related ratios, which is time-consuming and can contain human errors. With CFO-in-a-box, digital banks see their business customers’ financial information and calculated ratios in a single platform anytime and anywhere, making daily operating activities much easier including loans, payments, and overall business insights.
Et voila! Finally – a way for SMBs to self-serve!
Now – let’s talk about how data accelerates the ability to serve SMBs when they need direct support. After all, that’s how the majority of transactions are getting done at the moment.
Traditionally, loan approval for small businesses takes a long time and if we’re honest here – it’s a painstaking process for the business and financial institution. After a client submits the request, banks need to collect all the relevant information, assess the risk, and score it manually. It’s slow, frustrating for clients, and costly for banks. Here’s the good news: saas software solutions with financial dashboards like CFO-in-a-box offer a much more efficient solution for digital banks which saves money and time.
CFO-in-a-Box is an end-to-end insights platform that creates ratios, dashboards, and SMB insights for fintechs and FIs business customers based on their accounting, sales, banking data, and more. The dashboard is engaged to gather real-time financial data on digital banks’ business applicants to offer personalized service in a scalable way. The platform gives businesses a secure way to share their financial data for real-time reporting and evaluation. It continues to do so for the duration of the loan and offers product suggestions. The return on investment (ROI) is clear. Your SMBs will have 51% faster decisions and 5X faster renewals. As a digital bank, you’ll do a better more personalized job for 60% of the cost.
Deloitte has highlighted the need for leadership to have financial and performance information on a real-time basis. With their nimble size and challenger status, digital banks can take a step ahead and act immediately. Access to real-time financial data on SMBs empowers banks by providing real-time data and calculations, allowing for a more complete understanding of their business’s health.
For the first time, fintechs and FIs can look at the health of the entire portfolio. They have a real-time view of which businesses have opportunities to adopt new financial products and which have early warning signals. Confidentially, between us, folks in financial services, ahead of a top 15 North American financial institution said off the record that what kept him up at night was all the loans being approved to SMBs. If the bank had access to updated financial information in a portfolio view the risks and opportunities would be identified and businesses would have been better served.
With the increasing pace of the industry and credit review requirements, there are greater needs for financial data than ever before. Real-time access to financial statements and sales information addresses those concerns in an automated way. Digital banks have access to this allowing them to make decisions about what lending models they’d like to pursue, and what product offerings they’d like to provide.
Financial dashboards allow financial relationship managers to quickly identify cash flow and other financial activity patterns by visualizing financial data, which enables managers to monitor portfolio operations and financial health on an ongoing basis. Managers are armed with notifications regarding potential risks faster and easier through financial dashboards – where all the information is displayed and visualized. With a comprehensive view of business health, fintechs and FIs are able to advise clients proactively and set goals for the organization, leading to long-term growth.
CFO-in-a-box collects and analyzes SMB data automatically, as a result, your digital bank will have more time to focus on empowering SMBs with insights to grow their business. Ultimately, enhancing the customer experience and reducing time spent on internal processes. The dashboard not only enhances personalization – but also allows fintechs and FIs to understand businesses in real-time and support internal strategic decisions through data-based insights. Digital banks’ future lies in utilizing real-time analytics sourced from financial dashboards to provide data-driven insights and enhance the SMB banking experience. If you’d like to learn more or try it out for yourself – reach out for a demo – you’ll get access the same day!
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